Are You Buying SEO ‘Off-the-Shelf’?

If so, your website ranking is paying the price!

Your head is probably spinning if you’re trying to determine who’s the best person or company to help you get your vending, OCS or micro market business ranked on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

So many promises, so much hype….you can barely open an email or read an article online without someone promising that their approach is “the best one” and worth every penny you will pay for it. You may have even invested in such services, and your results fell far short of expectations. You wouldn’t be alone.

In search engine ranking work, off-the-shelf programs, often included with a content management system like WordPress, are not going to cut it with SERPs…and “uniquely customized SEO” is just a smokescreen for charging you more money than you should be paying.

Done right, effective SEO involves strategically matched on-page and off-page efforts executed over time – all designed and implemented with Google’s algorithms in mind.

While most people know about using the right keywords and other on-page SEO techniques to build authority with Google (and other search engines), they often don’t realize that the “load time” of their pages is something that Google factors into its rankings. If your page is bogged down with huge pictures/graphics or other unnecessary material, that’s a problem. Off-the-shelf SEO typically won’t factor that in.

The design of your home page and other website pages is critical as well. It’s important that all material, especially copy that appears “above the fold,” is easily and quickly read by search engine crawlers, including photos and graphics that must be alt-tagged since Google can’t “read” a photo. And the page length is important – can’t have too many words or too few.

Custom content development is another must have. Many third party SEO providers promise “pages and pages” of content, but most people don’t realize that content today can be created by bots or machines that just take your keywords and other metadata and churn out articles that often includes misspelled words and grammar errors – red flags for conversions!

Finally, no one wants to pay twice for the same thing so choose an SEO partner that has the right credentials and fits your price point, and always ask for reports! Then it’s just a matter of staying on top of content development and ahead of the curve on changes to Google’s algorithms.